derkloks_cloxboy

My friend and fellow GAD student Jennie Devine (http://jennies-gad-blog.tumblr.com/) sent me a link to this artist on DeviantArt: http://derklox-cloxboy.deviantart.com/ "Cloxboy".

He paints exquisite paintings of very morbid characters, exploded (literally) silhouettes and very fine painterly detail. I love the dynamic brush strokes that Cloxboy uses to make a sense of movement in his paintings.

 

I particularly love the deep, bright intrusive red in the background of this piece. It makes the grey colours seem warmer and more lifelike in my opinion, and gives the skull in the picture life again as it has connotations of blood.

I really love his application of a blur to certain portions of his paintings as well, they enhance the movement of the brush-strokes and make it seem like the artist has captured a fleeting moment of something being destroyed or torn. 

I had a small play in Photoshop with attempting this technique. I used colours to imitate flesh and bone, colour picked from some of his paintings in order to capture his style more effectively and see how he uses colours 

Below are two experiments I did in Cloxboy's style. I tried to keep the large strokes and dynamic, painterly brush work the object of the experiments. The picture on the right was the base image sketched in Photoshop, then I exported it to Artrage and worked on it some more. I feel that I kind of lost the speed and lines in my  more detailed piece - whether this is due to not being comfortable or familiar with the software, I'm not sure.

Above I had a go at playing with the same style of Cloxboy's paintings. I found a brush that had many fine grains of texture in it (see below):

I feel that the first 4 paintings didn't effectively convey enough detail. I looked at insect forms relating to armour, and rendered this helmet - still using the contrasting colours (as used by Cloxboy), and the fast, loose approach to laying shapes down.

I feel that I did this exceptionally well, and I'm quite proud of how my helmet iteration has turned out. I hope I can continue to produce iterations of this speed and quality in BA8.